


Blindsided

by rabidsamfan



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 01:39:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/894283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidsamfan/pseuds/rabidsamfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>au version of the beginning of "A Study in Pink"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blindsided

**Author's Note:**

> for JWP #20, late. (I've had a stupidly busy month, and am so far behind I'll never catch up, but this one called to me.) Rabbit Season, from an old plotbunny where John is blind from agent_era.

He was walking through the park when he heard someone call his name.

“Watson?” The voice was behind and to the left. “John Watson?” Familiar, too. John took a deep breath and turned, raising the hand holding his cane into a protective position near his heart. With any luck, the person accosting him would notice that it was white and do them both the favour of pretending that nothing had been said.

“It’s Mike,” the voice was closer, “Mike Stamford. Twelve o’clock, chest high.”

Mike Stamford? For a moment John couldn’t place the name – but then he did, and fumbled in the air in front of him till he found the hand that was waiting for him. “Mike. It’s good to s… to meet up with you. What are you doing in London?”

“Teaching over at Bart’s. Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Or are you heading somewhere?”

“No. I’m just out for some air.” John could smell the coffee vendor a few paces away, and he waited while Mike made his purchases. “How is it going, then, teaching?” he asked, when Mike came back and handed over one of the cups.

Without any fuss, Mike took the cane and drew John’s hand to the crook of his own elbow before leading the way to a nearby park bench. “On your left,” he warned, as he sat down. “It’s not what I thought I’d be doing with my degree,” he went on, as blithely as if John weren’t having to test the air to locate the bench properly. “But the hours are regular, and it turns out I’ve got a bit of a knack for pounding the names of bones into boneheads.”

John felt himself smiling for the first time in a very long time. He could imagine the look of wry disdain on Mike’s face, even if he couldn’t see it. “You’re teaching anatomy?” he asked. “What happened to Professor Bell?”

Mike shifted and took a deeper, uncomfortable breath. “You remember he had diabetes?”

“Had?” John’s smile fled. He’d liked Bell. The old man had been one of the most amazing diagnosticians he had ever met, able to identify problems from tiny clues within moments of meeting a patient. And he’d been one of the few teachers John had who understood why anyone would want to go into the Army.

“Yeah.” Mike sighed. “He officially retired about six months after we graduated – his sight was going – but he used to come in to the anatomy lab and give my students grief. I swear he could _smell_ them making the wrong incisions. I spent a lot of time with him, practicing my lectures and working over the curriculum. It’s too bad you missed him. If you’d been back in London two months ago…”

“He’d have told me how to be properly blind,” John finished the sentence, bitterly.

“He’d have been happy to have a chance to talk to you,” Mike corrected gently. “He loved it when old students came by.” John could hear the double take. “Wait. Wait. _Properly_ blind? What are you on about?”

 _You hung around Bell too much,_ John thought, as he fought to keep his composure. He should have known better than to mention it. “It’s psychosomatic, Mike,” he growled between his teeth. “According to the Army, the NHS, and every test known to modern medicine I shouldn’t be blind at all.”  
Mike whistled through his teeth. “That’s why no dog,” he said. “They’re waiting for it to just go away.”

“Who’s going to waste a dog on a chap like me?” John exclaimed.

“Funny you should say that,” Mike said. He sounded suspiciously like he was grinning.

Half an hour and a cab ride later, John had given up trying to pry more information out of Mike. The man had been unnervingly pleased to learn John’s current address – a tiny room at a “care facility” out at the farthest flung reaches of the Underground – and if it weren’t that he couldn’t imagine it being worth anyone’s time – even Mike’s – to go out that far, John would have suspected he would get home to a bucket of water over the door or a pie bed.

Still, Mike’s practical jokes had always been funny in retrospect, even to the victims, and John was so tired of being lonely and bored he was willing to go along with things for now. He’d heard Mike give the cab driver a Baker Street address, so it wasn’t like he couldn’t get home by the Underground once the fun was done.

As he waited for someone to answer Mike’s knocking, John listened to the sounds of the street around him. It seemed fairly busy, but not so full of traffic that a man couldn’t manage to cross the street when he needed to. By the smell, and the muffled clank of cutlery, there was a restaurant of some kind within a door or two, so there were probably shops. Just the kind of place he’d always wanted to live, if a good fairy somehow tapped him on the shoulder with a magic “you’ve got money” wand. Even more so now, not that he could manage it on his disability pension.

The door opened to a smell of powder, lavender, baking bread and wet dog. “Mike!” The speaker was an older woman. “Hello, dear!” John could hear them hugging. “What brings you here?”

“What else? Did he come back again?”

“Of course he did.” The woman’s happiness was tempered by some kind of worry. “He’s out in the yard. Who’s your friend?”

“Oh. Mrs H, this is John Watson. John, this is Mrs Hudson. She’s the landlady here.”

“How do you do?” A soft hand took his. “Mike, are you thinking…?”  
“I am. Look, why don’t we come inside?”

As they made their way through a hall that echoed narrowly into the kitchen where the bread was baking, John listened to Mike and Mrs Hudson debating as if he weren’t the one under discussion.

“It’ll never work. He’ll just come back again, and you know what that fusspot with the brolly means to do with him the next time.”

“Yes, but what I’m thinking is that we could actually kill two birds with one stone.”

“Oh, is he looking for a flat, then?”

“Is who looking for a flat?” John interrupted. “Who are you talking about?”

“You, John,” Mike said. “You don’t want to stay stuck out in the wilds of Dagenham. With a place in Central London you could get to everything you need without spending a fortune on cab fares and the Tube.”

“I can’t afford a place in Central London,” John protested.

“What can you afford, dear?” Mrs Hudson interjected. John named a figure. It wasn’t a very large one. She tutted. “Well, it would be a bit tight, but we could manage. It all depends on whether or not he takes to you. He’s an excellent judge of character, after all, and it was his warning that kept me from ending up in another one of those unmarked graves in the cellar.”

“They should just give him to you,” Mike grumbled. He was moving around the kitchen like it was very familiar to him. John heard the scrape of a chair being set beside him. “Here, you should be sitting, John.”

“I wish they would, Mike,” Mrs Hudson, by the sound of it, was rummaging in a cupboard. “But you know that Mycroft doesn’t think it’s appropriate. He says I would be a waste of all that training.”

“Wait. Unmarked graves? Training? Mycroft?” John had the distinct feeling his questions were being ignored.

Mrs Hudson pressed something into his hands. “Here, dear. Hold that. He does love fresh bread with honey. And just let him come to you. It’s always easier when he thinks it’s his idea.”  
A door was opened to the outside, letting in the sounds of traffic and the smell of the city. And a dog. A rather large one, by the clatter of its claws on the linoleum.

John glared in the direction he hoped Mike was standing. If he hadn’t had the bread in one hand and his cane in the other he’d have buried his face in his hands. This was worse than the time Mike had arranged a blind date for John with a girl who stood six foot three in her stocking feet. Not that it hadn’t turned out to be a fun date, but John could have made a better impression if he’d been forewarned.

“Sherlock, we’ve got company,” Mrs Hudson spoke to the dog as if it could understand. “Be polite, and don’t take the bread until it’s offered.”

“He was Professor Bell’s dog,” Mike explained quietly as the dog ventured over to sniff at John’s feet. “They got along like a house on fire, wandered all over London, even got caught up in some police cases. The agency keeps trying to place him with little old ladies or retired gentlemen who never go out of their way to explore beyond the areas they already know. Sherlock gets bored in no time and comes back here. The agency’s threatening to send him to Scotland next time, but he’s a Londoner. It’d break his heart.”

The questing nose ventured higher, pausing at the scar on John’s thigh, even though there was no way the dog could see it, and then up along John’s arm to pause again at the scar on his shoulder.

“Now how do you know about that?” John asked the dog. “X-ray scent vision?”

“Woof,” the dog remarked agreeably. It nuzzled his collar, and then, to his surprise, sat beside the chair, resting its muzzle on the wrist of his cane hand.

John put the bread and honey within reach of the long tongue. “Go ahead,” he said. “You’ve been a good boy.”

The dog snorted, but it took the bread.

“So you want me to move in here in order to give Mrs Hudson an excuse to keep the dog?” he asked Mike.

“Well, that and I want you to move in here so that Mrs Hudson doesn’t have to chuck all of Professor Bell’s books and papers and experiments into the bin so a new tenant can move in upstairs. I haven’t got room for them at my place. Besides, if you take on Sherlock, I promise you you’ll never be bored.”


End file.
